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[NOTE: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific American.]

A few years ago, soon after moving to Los Angeles, an old grad school buddy of the Time Lord came to town, Brian Schmidt, and we took him to a nearby tapas eatery for nibbles and pisco sours. I remember they were shooting a scene from a Will Smith movie that night, so nearby storefronts were riddled with fake bullet holes, and the odd fake gunfire and explosion interrupted our conversation. Unfazed, Brian regaled us with tales of his life in Australia, where he juggles research with running his very own winery -- hence his Twitter handle, @CosmicPinot. After saying farewell, I commented to the Time Lord as we walked back home how much I liked Brian: "You have really nice friends." (It's true; pretty much all of the Time Lord's pals are delightful, but then, I'm partial to physicists.) He agreed, and added, "And you know what else? He will absolutely win the Nobel Prize some day."

It's a fitting coda to what turns out to be just the beginning of an epic saga of the quest to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. Because the most likely explanation we have (so far) for this observed acceleration is a mysterious thing called dark energy that makes up a whopping 73% of all the "stuff" in the universe.

Einstein's Fudge Factor

Once upon a time, physicists believed the cosmos was static and unchanging, a celestial clockwork mechanism that would run forever. When Albert Einstein was forming his theory of general relativity in 1917, his calculations indicated that the universe should be expanding. But all the observations up to then showed a static universe. So he figured his calculations were incorrect, and introduced a mathematical “fudge factor” into his equations, known as the cosmological constant, or lambda. It implied the existence of a repulsive force pervading space that counteracts the gravitational attraction holding the galaxies together. This balanced out the “push” and “pull” so that the universe would indeed be static.

Einstein should have trusted his instincts. Twelve years later, Edwin Hubble was studying distant galaxies, and noticed an intriguing effect in the light they emitted: it had a pronounced “Doppler shift” toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Basically, when a light source is moving towards an observer, the wavelength of its emitted light compresses and shifts to the blue end of the spectrum. When moving away from the observer, the wavelength stretches, and the light shifts to the red end of the spectrum. Hubble reasoned that this could only be happening if the light were traveling across space that is expanding.

The conclusion was inescapable. Einstein’s original equations had been correct, and there was no need for a cosmological constant. The cosmos was still expanding. That's why Einstein famously denounced lambda as his “greatest blunder.”

That discovery turned cosmology on its head. If the universe were still expanding, scientists reasoned, eventually the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate of expansion. They spent the next 70 years trying to measure that rate. If they knew how the rate of expansion was changing over time, they could deduce the shape of the universe. And its shape was believed to determine its fate. Matter curves space and time around it and gives rise to what we recognize as gravity. The more matter there is, the stronger the pull of gravity, and the more space will curve – making it more likely that the current expansion would halt and the universe would collapse back in on itself in a “Big Crunch.” If there’s not enough matter, the pull of gravity would gradually weaken as galaxies and other celestial objects move farther apart, and the universe would expand forever with essentially no end.

A flat universe, with just the right balance of matter, would mean that the expansion will slow down indefinitely, without recollapsing. A flat universe was the favored option; scientists just needed to precisely measure the acceleration rate to confirm the prediction.

Faster, Faster....

Once again, Einstein was a bit too hasty in dismissing his work. In 1998, two separate teams of physicists measured the change in the universe’s expansion rate, using distant supernovae as mileposts: one led by Perlmutter, the other by Schmidt. The Time Lord shared an office with Schmidt back in the early 1990s. As he tells it in his book, From Eternity to Here:

I was the idealistic theorist and he was the no-nonsense observer. In those days, when the technology of large-scale surveys in astronomy was just in its infancy, it was a commonplace belief that measuring the cosmological parameters was a fool's errand, doomed to be plagued by enormous uncertainties that would prevent us from determining the size and shape of the universe with anything like the precision we desired. Brian and I made a bet concerning whether we would be able to accurately measure the total matter density of the universe within 20 years. I said we would; Brian was sure we wouldn't. We were poor graduate students at the time, but purchased a small bottle of vintage port, to be secreted away for two decades before we knew who had won. Happily for both of us, we learned the answer long before then. I won the bet, due in large part to the efforts of Brian himself. We split the bottle of port on the roof of Harvard's Quincy House in 2005.

Why supernovae? They're the best "standard candles" we've got. Because they are among the brightest objects in the universe, these exploding stars can help astronomers determine distances in space. By matching up those distances with how much the light from a supernova has shifted, the two teams could calculate how the expansion rate has changed over time. Light that began its journey across space from a source 10 billion years ago would have a red shift markedly more pronounced than the light that was emitted from a source just 1 billion years ago.

When Hubble made his 1929 measurements, the farthest red-shifted galaxies were roughly 6 million light years away. If expansion was now slowing, supernovae in those distant galaxies should appear brighter and closer than their red shifts would suggest. Instead, just the opposite was true. At high red shifts, the most distant supernovae are dimmer than they would be if the universe were slowing down. The only plausible explanation for this is that instead of gradually slowing down, the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

It was bizarre and completely unexpected. Since 1998, cosmologists have been grappling a whole new set of questions implied by that momentous discovery, the foremost of which is the makeup of the mysterious dark energy that appears to be winning the cosmic tug-of-war. And once again, the discovery turned cosmology on its head.

Now the story goes something like this: very early in the universe’s existence, dark matter dominated. Everything was closer together, so its density was higher than that of the dark energy, and its gravitational pull was stronger. This led to the clumping that formed early galaxies. But as the universe continued to expand, the dark matter density, and hence the gravitational pull, decreased until it was less than that of the dark energy. So instead of the expected slow-down in the expansion rate, the now-dominant dark energy began pushing the universe apart at ever-faster rates.

Where does this dark energy come from? That's the big question. But it’s a testament to Einstein’s genius that even his blunders prove to be significant. Remember his “fudge factor,” Lambda implied the existence of a repulsive form of gravity, and the simplest example of that is the vacuum energy. Quantum physics holds that even the emptiest vacuum is teeming with energy in the form of “virtual” particles that wink in and out of existence, flying apart and coming together in an intricate quantum dance. This roiling sea of virtual particles could give rise to dark energy, giving the universe a little extra push so that it can continue accelerating.

The problem is that the numbers don’t add up. The quantum vacuum contains too much energy: roughly 10120 times too much. So the universe should be accelerating much faster than it is. An alternative theory proposes that the universe may be filled with an even more exotic, fluctuating form of dark energy dubbed “quintessence.” Yet all the observations to date indicate that the dark energy is constant, not fluctuating. So scientists must consider even more possibilities. The dark energy could be the result of the influence of unseen extra dimensions predicted by string theory. Alternatively, the dark energy could be due to neutrinos – the lightest particles of matter – interacting with hypothetical particles called “accelerons.” Some scientists have theorized that dark matter and dark energy emanate from the same source – they just don’t know what that source might be. Yet it’s just as likely that there is no connection, and the two are very different things. Or perhaps there is no such thing as dark energy, and we need to revise Einstein's general theory of relativity, and/or devise a theory of quantum gravity.

Scientists love to explore the unknown, so these are exciting times for cosmologists. Congratulations to Schmidt, Reiss and Perlmutter for a well-deserved honor -- and here's to the future Nobel-worthy discoveries yet to be made!

[NOTE: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific America.]

Four years ago on this date, the Time Lord and I officially tied the knot. I wrote the piece below last fall, as The Calculus Diaries was coming out, but it didn't really seem to fit anywhere --too "math-y" for the mainstream, too intensely personal for your average science publication, and honestly, still kind of a work in progress. But in the spirit of the blog as "writing lab," it seems appropriate to post it here, on our fourth anniversary, as a way of saying thanks to the man who irrevocably changed my life ... for the better. Here's to many more years to come.

Shortly after becoming engaged, my now-husband and I drove from a conference in San Francisco to our new home in Los Angeles via the scenic route along the Pacific Coast Highway. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel just north of Malibu and found ourselves admiring the brilliant orange, red, and purple hues stretching across the darkening horizon, savoring the peaceful sound of ocean waves lapping against the shore. Against this idyllic Hallmark moment, Sean put his arms around me, pressed his cheek to mine, and gently whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?” A

Fourier transform is a mathematical equation that takes a complex wave of any kind – water, sound, light, even the gravitational waves that permeate the fabric of space time – and breaks it down into its component parts to reveal the full spectrum of “colors” that are otherwise hidden from human perception.

Another woman might have been taken aback by Sean injecting a bit of cold hard math into the warm hues of a romantic ocean sunset – talk about over-analyzing the scene and spoiling the mood! Me? I found it charming, yet another intriguing color in the spectrum that makes up this multifaceted man with whom I have chosen to share my life. My husband is a theoretical physicist. He spends his days pondering big questions about space, time, and the origins of the universe.

It’s not just Fourier transforms that lurk in the nooks and crannies of our marriage. Our pillow talk includes animated discussions about Boltzmann brains, the rules of time travel, poker, phase transitions, and the possibility of a multiverse: the notion that there are an infinite number of universes out there, beyond our ken, perhaps containing carbon copies of ourselves – the same, and yet somehow different. I have issues with this concept, especially when I’m sleepy: all those universes filled with doppelgangers cluttering up the landscape just strikes me as crowded and untidy. But Sean wrestles with these questions all the time, and is adamant in his defense. “It’s infinity,” he reassures me. “It’s not like we’ll run out of room!” I guess the multiverse has unlimited storage space.

I wasn’t looking to fall in love, and never imagined I would be a wife. Years of failed relationships had convinced me that I had no gift for making love work. My romantic calculations seemed doomed to failure, always slightly off, never quite yielding the right combination, no matter how intricately I manipulated the numbers. By the time Sean entered my orbit, my heart had been broken into little pieces and reassembled so many times, I was convinced the telltale cracks would never fully heal. I gave up on dating, buried myself in work and told myself it was better this way. I built a thick wall around my heart and guarded the perimeter zealously.

Love stole back into my life, ninja-like, while I was looking the other way. Sean is a scientist, and I am a science writer, but our day-to-day lives were like parallel lines that never met. Our paths didn’t cross until we discovered each other’s blogs online. We quickly formed an online friendship, both recognizing a kindred spirit across the vast expanse of Cyberspace. Two months and many emails later, we arranged to meet over dinner at a physics conference in Dallas.

Physicists are often unfairly characterized as absent-minded geniuses, socially inept, with zero fashion sense, a la Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. It's an exaggeration, but there is a tiny element of truth to that. So I was pleasantly surprised when a tall, lanky man with boyish good looks and an engaging smile appeared in the hotel bar, sporting jeans and a casual-yet-chic jacket. This was not your stereotypical physicist.

He ordered a martini. “I’d like to taste the vermouth,” he instructed the bartender. (He is a man who takes his cocktails seriously.) We chatted about science, art, music, and books, with the odd foray into personal details and more philosophical musings. A first date is usually fraught with self-conscious anxiety, as each person strives to present only the most flattering colors in their personal spectrum -- preferably through a soft-focus lens. But we had an instant rapport, an easy familiarity from our electronic exchanges that translated effortlessly into “meat space.” By the end of the evening, I was smitten, and happily, the feeling was mutual.

We defied the geographical distance, racking up countless frequent flyer miles. Six months after that first encounter, he proposed, and a year later, I found myself married and living in sunny southern California. I felt as if I’d stepped into an alternate universe where the calculations of love had finally worked out in my favor. I had become my own doppelganger.

With my new life came a new appreciation for the secret language of scientists: mathematics. Like many people, I had steadfastly avoided all things math since high school. My eyes glazed over at the merest glimpse of an equation. I was convinced it was irrelevant to my life – or at the very least, unnecessary. But now that life featured a man who left technical papers scattered about the house, filled with mysterious symbols that might encode the secrets of the universe. Our living room boasted a white board with a constantly changing parade of scrawled equations, and our groaning bookshelves now included massive tomes on quantum mechanics and general relativity.

The deep, technical aspects of his work was the one part of Sean’s life that was truly closed to me, although as someone who writes about physics for a living, I certainly grasped the basic concepts -- far more than the average non-physicist. But if I wanted to appreciate the full spectrum of the man I’d married, I would have to learn a little bit more of his language. So I resolved to overcome my longstanding kneejerk rejection of all things numerical and teach myself the basics of calculus.

Sean was patience personified during my quest, explaining basic concepts, leaving practice problems on our white board every morning for me to solve, and artfully dodging the occasional bit of metaphorical heaved crockery whenever I hit a frustrating obstacle (“Integrate that!”). The frustration was real: Our communication gap when it came to math was a yawning chasm at the outset. Often I didn’t even know how to phrase my questions in a way he could comprehend.

Slowly, surely, that gap began to close as he helped me see that equations were all around me. We found calculus in the rides at Disneyland, and the exquisite architecture of Antoni Gaudi. We went to Vegas, learned to shoot craps, and Sean tutored me in the calculus of probability (and a spot of game theory for good measure). Even our quest to buy a house became fodder for exploration.

It turns out that the world is filled with hidden connections, recurring patterns, and intricate details that can only be seen through math-colored glasses. Those abstract symbols hold meaning. How could I ever have thought it was irrelevant? This is what I have learned from loving a physicist. Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.

I will never listen to ocean waves or view the setting sun in quite the same way again. I looked out over the water that evening and saw a picture-perfect ocean sunset, but there was so much more that I missed. Sean looked out onto the same scene and saw the rich complexity of nature expressed in mathematical symbols, the fundamental abstract order lying just beneath the surface. And through his eyes, I can now catch a glimpse of that hidden world -- proof that love can transform you just as surely as the Fourier equation transforms a seemingly simple ray of white light into shimmering technicolor. Happy anniversary, Time Lord!

UPDATE: Was running around doing anniversary stuff all day yesterday, but as a commenter points out, I failed to identify xkcd, Randal Munroe's brilliant Webcomic, as the source for the two cartoons. Usually I link to image sources somewhere in the text, but failed this time. Although if you didn't recognize the source, you really should be reading xkcd on a regular basis. He updates three times a week. Go! Read him! Wedding photo by Jen Kerker Photography. And the video -- for those who didn't click through to YouTube -- was an award-winning entry to a UK jobs site ad campaign, believe it or not: reed.co.uk's "Love Mondays" series.

[NOTE: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific American.]

One of the biggest movies of the fall so far is Contagion, which garnered strong reviews -- including from the science blogosphere -- and roared to a $23.1 million opening when it debuted a few weeks ago, easily beating out the other box office contenders. So it's understandable that a few hidden gems slipped under the radar. Case in point: many people missed the sleeper film, Warrior, whose cast of characters includes Brendan Conlon (Joel Edgerton), a.k.a., the Most Badass Physics Teacher E-VAH!

When we first meet Brendan, he doesn't look too tough: his two young daughters are gleefully painting his face during a family birthday party. But he's definitely hands-on in the classroom, instructing his students on the finer points of F=ma by means of a sledgehammer and concrete blocks. And then we see him lifting weights in the garage, and learn he moonlights as a bouncer at a local strip club to help make ends meet, since his salary as a public school teacher isn't sufficient to ward off the looming threat of foreclosure on their modest Pittsburgh house.

At least that's what he tells his wife Tess (House MD's Jennifer Morrison). In reality, he has re-entered the world of amateur mixed martial arts (MMA) to earn a bit of extra cash. A former UFC fighter, he makes quick enough work of the local "weekend warriors" with delusions of being the next Matt Hughes or Randy Couture. No doubt that physics background helps, too: martial arts is all about force, energy transfer, leverage, and momentum. (Perhaps the official motto should be, "Physics can kick your ass!") But when the school board learns of his extracurricular activities, he is suspended without pay for the semester.

Principal: "We can't have one of our teachers cage-fighting in a strip club!"

Brendan: "Technically, it was in the parking lot outside the strip club...."

What's an out of work physics teacher gonna do to save his house and protect his family? He's gonna enter Sparta, the biggest, most brutal MMA competition out there, with a winner-takes-all purse of $5 million. That means coming out of retirement to take on a field of younger, powerful, highly skilled fighters like the undefeated Koba (played by real-life MMA fighter Kurt Angle). And it also pits him against another underdog, Marine Corps war hero Tommy Riordon (Tom Hardy) -- who just happens to be Brendan's estranged brother. I think we can all see where this is going, and if not, the trailer lays it all out for you:

Don't let the lackluster marketing campaign fool you: Warrior isn't just another tired retread of Rocky, despite the working-class background and underdog status of its heroes. For starters, most such films allocate a few days to film climactic fight scenes. But Warrior is so fight-intensive that director Gavin O'Connor spent an entire month filming those sequences. The pacing, cinematography, and realistic choreography of those scenes is astonishing -- it captures the beauty, not just the brutality, of this controversial sport (which, for the record, is nothing like professional wrestling, despite the cheesy trappings and scantily clad ring girls).

Those sequences took their toll on the actors, too. In an interview with Den of Geek, Edgerton revealed that he and co-star Brady trained "literally from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. It was fighting all morning, eat a massive meal with the stunt guys and then come back to lift massive weights... Because at some point Tom and I knew we had to get our shirts off, stand in a cage... and look like we belonged there."

The film is also grittier, more thoughtful, and starts slow out of the gate, carefully building up the characters and complex, layered relationships, so that by the time the two brothers face off in the Octagon for the inevitable showdown, we understand fully what's at stake, and we're rooting for both of them. It's not a prize purse, or a thirst for macho glory. Each brother is literally fighting for his life, and for the lives of those who depend on him. You desperately want them both to win -- but there can be only one victor. Them's the rules.

So who will it be, the brute or the tactician? In one corner, you've got the pitbull ferocity and merciless efficiency of Tommy, a seething cauldron of pain and rage, who once tore the door off a tank in Iraq to save a fellow Marine, and who dispatches most of his opponents in the first round with a vicious knockout punch. (Announcer #1, musing on Tommy's chances before his first fight: "I dunno, sure, he's tough, but a tank doesn't hit back." Announcer #2: "Yeah, but.... HE TORE THE DOOR OFF A FRICKIN' TANK!".)

In the other corner, there's the steely, calm resolve of Brendan, the high school physics teacher with the big, big heart, who doesn't exactly dazzle with his technical prowess, and seems to lack the killer instinct. (Announcer #1: "Remember him from the UFC?" Announcer #2: "Yeah, I remember how unmemorable he was." He then compares Brandon to a harmless goldfish in a plastic bag.) But he's smart, and patient, and unbelievably tough. He can take a helluva beating and wait for an opening, a small mistake, that he can exploit to gain the upper hand and win -- if he doesn't get killed in the process.

Who wins? Go see the movie! Warrior deserves a bigger audience than it's managed to find so far -- which is why you should all run right out and see it while it's still in theaters. On your way home afterwards, perhaps you can take a moment to consider the plight of our woefully underpaid physics teachers, forced to engage in brutal cage-fights in the parking lots of strip clubs. Then again, is there anything more suspenseful than a physics class where the teacher might at any moment whip out a big ol' can of whup-ass to demonstrate Newtonian mechanics?

Okay, so Brandon is fictional. I know there are tons of hard-working high school physics teachers out there, laboring in the trenches to reach students who honestly can't see what possible use they could have for physics. I invite readers to nominate their favorite, most inspiring physics teacher in the comments, to be featured in a future blog post -- because they deserve the recognition! Right? And hopefully, one day, a pay raise.

RELATED BLOG POSTS:

FYI, I earned a black belt in jujitsu in 2000, and have been a fan of MMA since the early days of the UFC, although I don't practice anymore, nor do I follow the sport religiously. But I do write about it from time to time, particularly on the underlying science. Here's some of those prior posts:

[Note: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific American.]

One day in 1969, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy convened in Washington, DC, to hear testimony from a number of scientists concerning a proposed multimillion dollar particle accelerator to be built in Batavia, Illinois. Physics had enjoyed strong government support for two decades in the wake of the Manhattan Project, which helped bring an end to World War II. But many in Congress simply couldn't see the point of spending all that money on a big machine that didn't seem to benefit US national interests in quite the same way.

During the testimony of physicist Robert Rathburn Wilson -- a veteran of the Manhattan Project -- then-senator John Pastore bluntly asked, "Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?"

Wilson, to his credit, answered just as bluntly: "No sir, I don't believe so."

"Nothing at all?" Pastore asked.

"Nothing at all."

Pastore pressed further: "It has no value in that respect?"

And then Wilson knocked it out of the park. "It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of man, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending."

Needless to say, the proposed accelerator got its funding, and Fermi National Laboratory was born. Wilson took the lead on the design and construction of the facility, and proved more than up to the task: Fermilab, as it is known today, was completed on time, and under budget. And its scientists went on to make some of the most fundamental discoveries in particle physics, garnering quite a few Nobel Prizes along the way.

I've been thinking about Wilson's zinger of a response to Pastore a lot lately, as economic woes and corresponding budget cuts threaten some pretty major scientific projects. (*cough* James Webb Space Telescope *cough*) We seem to have lost our sense that science, just for the sake of science, adds something unique and valuable to society, beyond the technological advances that it enables. The emphasis these days is always on, "Well, what is it good for?"

It's a fair question, and I'm all for being practical. Those technological advances have been truly extraordinary and have revolutionized every aspect of our lives. But let's not, in the process, devalue the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Science, Wilson realized, is part of what makes a country worth defending, and his life's work reflected that.

Pistol-Packin' Physicist

Wilson was born in Frontier, Wyoming, in 1914, and growing up in the wild west no doubt gave him his lifelong love of the great outdoors, not to mention that hint of a swagger that was among his many trademarks. "He always had big, wild tales about being a cowboy in Wyoming," Dale Corson, a physicist and longtime friend of Wilson, told the New York Times for Wilson's obituary in 2000. "Most of them turned out to be true." But he also loved to tinker with pumps and vacuum tubes, as a boy, and soon found himself fascinated by the fundamental building blocks of nature -- at least, those that were known at the time. "We only had electrons and protons, and you could put those together into atoms in various ways and make the whole universe," he later recalled. "It was a very simple theory that even a dope could understand. I decided then that I wanted to go into physics."

By 1932, he'd found a place in Ernest O. Lawrence's flagship cyclotron laboratory (the "Rad Lab") at the University of California, Berkeley, although he was infamously fired twice: once for losing a rubber seal right before a presentation to a potential donor, and once for accidentally melting a pair of pliers while welding. He was offered his job back both times, but the second time, he opted to leave the Rad Lab and go to Princeton instead.

That's where he was when Oppenheimer chose him to be part of the elite corps of scientists on thee Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which opened in 1943 under the greatest secrecy. Wilson found himself heading the Cyclotron Group -- the youngest group leader in the experimental division. He was reluctant to take the job at first; he wanted to do science, not get bogged down in administration. Oppenheimer asked Enrico Fermi to intervene and persuade Wilson to head the new division.

When Wilson pointed out that Fermi himself would never accept such a position, and he was merely following his mentor's example, Fermi shot back, "It's something you have to earn, and you're not Fermi yet." In the end, Fermi convinced him to take the job by promising to meet with Wilson every Friday to talk about the physics being done. In his own account, Wilson admitted, "Sure I sold out -- but then everyone has his price, and mine was a few moments each week with Fermi."

Wilson sometimes chafed at the tight security around Los Alamos, occasionally teasing the security guards charged with protecting the spheres of uranium-235. The scientists were conducting delicate experiment to measure the rate at which neutrons multiplied in those sphere, along with a control sphere of regular uranium. Wilson proposed that he be issued a pistol so that he could guard the spheres himself. "After all, I came from Wyoming, where every red-blooded boy learned to shoot before he could walk."

Oppenheimer agreed, but Wilson had to first be certified to ensure he really could handle a pistol. So he was taken to a firing range, given a Colt .38, and subjected to a detailed lecture on how to properly handle and fire the weapon. His instructor then fired six shots at a target before handing the gun to Wilson to try. As Wilson recalls, "I had learned in Wyoming to 'roll' a pistol in order to get a lot of shots off accurately and rapidly. That's just what I did. Most of my shots were closer to the bull's eye than were his."

For all the hijinks, nobody forgot that the work they were doing at Los Alamos was both vital to national defense, and highly dangerous due to the radioactive substances involved. Wilson recalled his own brush with death while assisting a physicist in the Critical Assemblies Group with another experiment to determine when criticality was reached as one stacked a series of enriched uranium hydride cubes. He was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find that the group didn't rely on the usual elaborate safety devices commonly used at cyclotron facilities at the time. Instead, the physicist arrived with a simple set-up involving a wooden table, a single neutron counter to monitor criticality, and a whole bunch of cubes of enriched uranium hydride.

Wilson watched, rapt, as the physicist started stacking uranium cubes, and then noticed with alarm that the neutron counter wasn't, well, counting. Upon inspection, he discovered that the voltage supply was burnt out. When the counter was turned back on, it lit up immediately, to Wilson's horror. "A few more cubes and the stack would have exceeded criticality and could well have become lethal," he recalled. Furious, Wilson chewed out the physicist, his division leader, and even raged about it to Oppenheimer himself, but he had to leave for Trinity the very next day, so he let the incident drop. Had he stayed and pursued the matter, Wilson believed, "I might have saved the lives of two people. To this day, the incident is on my conscience."

Those two people were Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin, both of whom died of radiation sickness after accidents that occurred while conducting critical experiments with a plutonium core -- known as "tickling the dragon." Daghlian's death was dramatized to great effect in the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy using a fictional character based on him named Michael Merriman (played by John Cusack). In Daghlian's case, the tungsten carbide bricks around the plutonium sphere -- designed to act as a radiation shield -- were improperly handled. The dose of radiation he received as a result was so high, he died within a mere 28 days of the accident. It's one of the dramatic high points of the film, along with the scene depicting the historical Trinity Test itself:

I was in a bunker 10,000 yards north of Ground Zero, and the wind was blowing in our direction. Minutes after the bomb went off, I began to get apprehensive because a section had peeled off from the mushroom cloud and was coming straight at us. Meanwhile, the doctor was reading that the radiation was much higher than he expected. We had about 10 trucks, so I ordered people to get in them and leave immediately. There were some soldiers stationed outside who told me they had to stay until they were relieved by a military officer, but using a vocabulary everyone could understand, I convinced them to get into a truck. As we left, that cloud of radioactive debris was right on top of us, and it was spooky. We were lucky though. About 25 miles later it came down on a bunch of cattle and turned their hair white.

Architect of Accelerators

After World War II ended, Wilson left Los Alamos to design accelerators at Cornell's Laboratory of Nuclear Studies, culminating in the university's flagship Electron-Positron Storage Ring (CESR). Based on his stellar reputation working with accelerators, in 1967, he took a leave of absence to become director of the National Accelerator Laboratory (renamed Fermilab in 1974), to oversee the construction of what would be the most powerful accelerator then in existence.

"Bob built accelerators because they were the best instruments for doing the physics he wanted to do," Wilson's Cornell colleague, Boyce McDaniel, recalled in 2000. "No one was more aware of the technical subtlety of accelerators, no one more ingenious in practical design, no one paid more attention to their aesthetic qualities. He thought of accelerator builders as the contemporary equivalent of the builders of the great cathedrals in France and Italy. But it was the physics potential that came first."

That aesthetic appreciation carried over into his design for Fermilab's main accelerator ring, although once again, its physics potential came first, with the most cutting-edge, forward-looking technology available. Yet it was intended from the start to be visible from the air, thanks to the construction of a 20-foot-high berm above the entire four-mile-long ring. There was no technical reason for that decision; Wilson just thought it would look nicer.

He also wanted Fermilab to an aesthetically pleasing work environment; he didn't want it to look like a typically sterile government lab. To that end, he made sure he restored part of the surrounding prairie, with ponds and a herd of bison, for good measure. Wilson designed the main building, now known as Wilson Hall in his honor, after being inspired by the medieval cathedral at Beauvais, France -- a kind of "cathedral of science," if you will. "When he created Fermilab, it certainly had style," Leon Lederman, who succeeded Wilson as director, recalled. "He was a showman in that sense. He took chances."

Wilson's style and personal creativity extended to abstract sculpture; his work is dotted all over the grounds of Fermilab, such as "Broken Symmetry," an orange-and-black three-span arch that spans one of the Pine Street entrance. It appears asymmetrical from any angle, except when viewed directly from below. He also sculpted "Mobius Strip" (self explanatory), "Tractricious" (made from scrap cryostat tubes from Tevatron magnets), and his most famous, the 32-foot-high "Hyperbolic Obelisk" at the foot of the reflecting pond in front of Wilson Hall. "If I wasn't being creative, I thought I was just wasting my time," Wilson once confessed.

Not that he wasn't first and foremost a pragmatist, mind you, despite his aesthetic sense. Wilson is also known as the "father of proton therapy," thanks to a 1946 paper he published, "Radiological Use of Fast Protons." He'd become interested in researching the effects of radiation damage on the human body as a result of his Los Alamos experiences -- especially the deaths of Daghlian and Slotin, which had affected him greatly. Most proton therapy facilities follow the tenets and techniques Wilson established in that groundbreaking paper in their treatment of cancer patients -- a peaceful use of a wartime technology, saving lives instead of taking them.

Wilson's name is not as well-known to the general public as that of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, or J. Robert Oppenheimer, but he was very much a "physicist's physicist." Bring up his name in a gathering of physicists, and you'll be regaled with everyone's favorite Wilson anecdote -- that's how much love and respect he inspired in those who worked with him. And deservedly so: he embodied the perfect balance between aesthetics, curiosity, and pragmatism.

Science isn't just about winning wars, treating cancer, or devising revolutionary new technologies to boost economic markets -- although it can and does accomplish all of those things. It's also about the sheer joy of discovery, of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, as essential a component of the human spirit as the greatest works of art, of music, of literature. And as such, it is worth defending.

[NOTE: This post originally appeared at our new home at Scientific American.]

Yesterday Greg Laden posted a tantalizing snippet from a news release announcing a NASA press conference (for 2 PM EST today, at which point the embargo was lifted), heralding a new discovery by the Kepler mission. What could it be? Perhaps..... ALIENS??? Or something even weirder? Here's a clue: "A representative from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., will join a panel of scientists to discuss the discovery."

One of the more evocative scenes in the original Star Wars film shows a disaffected Luke Skywalker staring glumly at two setting suns in the sky on his desert-like home planet of Tatooine. These "suns" are G-type and K-type twin stars (known as Tatoo I and Tatoo II -- I looked it up, okay?). The planet's surface is so hot and dry that the human inhabitants live underground and "farm" any moisture they can scrounge up. It's a pretty grim existence. No wonder young Skywalker is so anxious to leave.

It's not the only science fiction planet with two suns, either. Everyone's favorite vampire with a soul, Angel, had a lengthy story arc in Season 2 set in a seemingly bucolic dimensional world known as Pylea, which also had two suns -- and apparently a different kind of sunlight, since Angel is delighted to discover that he doesn’t spontaneously combust when hit with sunlight on Pylea, exulting, “Did everybody notice how much fire I’m not on?” On Pylea, humans are slaves and the dominant species of horned demons have no concept of music. Which is why everyone's favorite karaoke-loving empath demon, Lorne (a.k.a. Krevlornswath of the Deathwok clan) left Pylea in the first place. His love of music made him a freak and an outcast.

Ahem. The point is, this whole "world with two suns" thing is a common trope. So fans of science fiction and fantasy should be thrilled at the reason for NASA's special press conference: a spanking new paper by Kepler scientists in the September 15 issue of Science, reporting the discovery of a planet roughly the size of Saturn that has "two suns" -- that is, it orbits both stars in a binary system. Squee! Let us pause a moment to do the Dance of Joy!

Seriously, this is terrific news. Can discovery of the womp rat, bantha, Sarlacc, or Krayt Dragon be far behind? Well, maybe. Let's take a quick look at what we'd need for such a planet to (a) form in the first place, and (b) stick around long enough to foster conditions conducive to life -- any life, not necessarily of the exiled Jedi knight variety, or the horned green-skinned members of the Deathwok clan.

Binary star systems are quite common in our universe. But can they form planets? The good news: yes, they can! Astronomers didn't used to think this was so. In a single-star system, like our own solar system, a young star is surrounded by an accretion disk of dust and gas, which gradually starts to clump together over millions of years, and as it cools, those clumps turn into rocks and form the cores of fledgling protoplanets. Those protoplanets pull in more and more debris (via gravity) until voila! You've got yourself a full-sized planet.

Things get a bit more complicated in a binary system, because you've got competing gravitational pulls, which can interfere with this accretionary process. The dust and gas that would otherwise form planets could be ejected from the system before said planets could fully form.

But it turns out that's not the only possible model for forming planets. Last year astronomers at Tennessee State University discovered a Jupiter-like planet orbiting one of a pair of binary stars, which they dubbed Inrakluk. It prompted them to propose an alternative "gravitational collapse" model for planets in binary star systems. Yes, it creates a turbulent environment for planet formation, but it can also lead to "overdense" regions of dust and gas, dense enough that the gravity of the cloud could rapidly collapse and form planets in just a few thousand years -- big ones, too, on a par with the gassy giant Jupiter. So yay! Planets can form in binary star systems. The next question is whether such planets have stable orbits, and here's where we get a bit of a reality check in our dream of a real-world Tatooine.

Most planets in binary star systems have unstable orbits, thanks to the dueling gravitational pulls of the two stars. Generally, one of two things happens: the newborn planet collides with one of its parent stars, or it is ejected out of the system. But there are some scenarios where a binary star system could have a stable orbit. For instance, if the two stars were very close together, but the planet in question was further away, its orbit would be a bit wobbly, but otherwise stable. Alternatively if the stars were far apart from each other, and the planet orbited just one of them, the orbit would be fairly stable, because the gravitational tug-of-war would be diminished.

That's what so unusual about this latest Kepler discovery: the planet is orbiting both members of the dual star system -- behavior that astronomers have suspected might occur, but haven't been able to observe such a planetary transit until now. (A planetary transit is what happens when a star's light dims as a planet passes in front of it -- one of the methods astronomers use to locate exoplanets.)

The team of researchers, led by the SETI Institute's Laurence Doyle, used data collected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which tracks the brightness of over 150,000 stars, to find this unlikely planet. Specifically, they noticed a binary star system with two eclipses: one when the smaller star of the pair partially blocks its larger sibling, and another (secondary) eclipse in which the larger star blocks out the smaller one.

Naturally, these eclipses caused corresponding drops in brightness, which Kepler duly measured. But then Doyle et al. noticed other drops in brightness -- third and fourth eclipses, if you will, that could not be attributed to the stars themselves being in an eclipse position. This strongly suggested the presence of a planet or other orbiting object.

It was also clear from the data that this object was orbiting both of the stars, because the extra "dimming events" (eclipses) occurred at irregular intervals, so the two stars had to be in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed by. Doyle's team measured all the variations in timing for each of the four eclipses and calculated the gravitational interactions between all three bodies, concluding that this mysterious object was, indeed, a planet, roughly the size of Saturn, orbiting its parent stars every 229 days. (A separate analysis revealed the twin stars orbit each other every 41 days.)

It's nothing like the ravaged desert setting of Tatooine (and certainly unlike the pastoral landscape of Pylea). Dubbed Kepler 16b -- could someone from LucasFilm help NASA come up with a catchier name? -- the newly discovered planet is really, really cold (-100 degrees Fahrenheit, at least, suitable only for a mythical Frost Giant), and probably does not foster life. That's because Kepler 16b's two suns are smaller and cooler than our own sun.

This has been a banner year for research on planets with twin suns. In April, Jack O'Malley James, an astronomer with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, co-authored a paper based on computer simulations hypothesizing that Earth-like alien planets with multiple suns might also boast trees and shrubs that are black or gray instead of green:

Photosynthesis -- converting sunlight into energy -- is the basis for the majority of life on Earth. It is the energy source for plants and, hence, animals higher up the food chain. With multiple light sources, life may have adapted to use all suns, or different forms may develop that choose to use one specific sun. This may be the more likely option for planets on which parts of the surface are illuminated by only one sun for long periods of time.

"If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis," he said in a statement at the time. "The temperature of a star determines its color and, hence, the color of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colors of their starlight, plants would evolve very differently." Assuming, of course, that the planet wasn't freezing cold, thereby making it impossible for plants to grow at all on its surface.

So science fiction is fast becoming science fact, it seems. Not only do we have experimental confirmation of the existence of exoplanets with twin suns, it's possible those suns would give off a different kind of light (energy), with implications for the kinds of flora (and fauna) it could sustain. We eagerly await a scientific paper on whether such sunlight would be particularly hospitable to vampires. And if so? Then we will dance!

Physics Cocktails

Heavy G

The perfect pick-me-up when gravity gets you down.
2 oz Tequila
2 oz Triple sec
2 oz Rose's sweetened lime juice
7-Up or Sprite
Mix tequila, triple sec and lime juice in a shaker and pour into a margarita glass. (Salted rim and ice are optional.) Top off with 7-Up/Sprite and let the weight of the world lift off your shoulders.

Any mad scientist will tell you that flames make drinking more fun. What good is science if no one gets hurt?
1 oz Midori melon liqueur
1-1/2 oz sour mix
1 splash soda water
151 proof rum
Mix melon liqueur, sour mix and soda water with ice in shaker. Shake and strain into martini glass. Top with rum and ignite. Try to take over the world.